![Rocky Mountain Flowers: The Daring Life and Art of Pioneering Plant Ecologist Edith Clements viaThe Marginalian [Shared]](http://welchwrite.com/agn/wp-content/uploads/2022/02/rockymountainflowers_edithclements16.jpg)
“There is one book that I would rather have produced than all my novels,” Willa Cather rued in her most candid interview about creativity. That book was Rocky Mountain Flowers: An Illustrated Guide For Plant-Lovers and Plant-Users by the pioneering plant ecologist and botanical artist Edith Clements (1874–1971).
Together with her husband, the influential botanist Frederic Clements, she pioneered the science of plant ecology, lending empirical substantiation to her contemporary John Muir’s poetic observation that “when we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe.” In her 1960 memoir Adventures in Ecology: Half a Million Miles: From Mud to Macadam , penned shortly before Rachel Carson awakened the modern ecological conscience with Silent Spring and half a century before the climate calamity we are now living, Edith Clements prophesied:
“There seems little doubt that the application of the principles of ecology to human affairs, whether personal, national or world-wide, would go far in solving the problems that beset us.”